Are Good Ideas Hard to Find?
This academic paper tells us a lot about why innovation has slowedFew would disagree that ideas are important to innovation and productivity growth. They are needed for new products, processes, and methods for their conception, introduction, and diffusion. One challenge is how new ideas fit together to enable positive outcomes. Is the initial idea for the concept the most important, the ideas for the implementation, or those for the many problems that must be solved over the course of a technology’s lifetime in order that the technology becomes better in any way we define better? An economics paper by researchers from Stanford and MIT tries to make sense of these issues. Published in the American Economic Review, the paper analyzes the number of researchers needed to achieve improvements in the number of Read More ›